Archinect - News

Wallabot peers 4 inches through walls to identify pipes, wires, and other hidden objects

2017-06-01T12:47:00-04:00

The Android-only Wallabot device is apparently designed to help you avoid sawing through a waterline or prematurely snipping an electrical wire by virtue of showing you what lurks beneath your walls before you begin working. The device, which is demonstrated via video below, is paired with your Android and then pressed against the wall, where it renders various objects in a vivid purple, thereby transforming otherwise seemingly boring walls (and other solid objects) into virtual archaeological excavations:

Exploring Alvar Aalto's "benign errors"

2016-08-30T12:56:00-04:00

Could one of Alvar Aalto's most sublime works be the result of a mistake? And more intriguingly, did Aalto exploit error to acheive a certain aesthetic/politically pointed effect? In this thoughtful piece on Medium, Dan Hill explores the role of "benign errors" in Aalto's work, a term the architect himself coined. Hill centers his focus on the concert hall known as Finlandia, taking particular issue with (but not limiting his scope to) the building's marble facade, noting that:

"Even more remarkably, this apparently uniform and utterly wonderful bowed marble grid appears to have been a mistake, an outcome of the temperature extremes in Helsinki (I’m reminded of the Dali-esque images of failing façades from Jeffrey Inaba's talk at Postopolis regarding Kazakhstan’s -40ºC to +40ºC, though it’s not quite that bad here.)"

For more on the legacy of Alvar Aalto:

Great Mistakes in English Medieval architecture

2014-08-21T13:17:00-04:00

One of the great things about medieval art and architecture is that people just went in and did things. They didn’t build models and scale them up, building great cathedrals and abbeys was a learning process as much as anything else. This means many of these apparently perfect aspirations to the Heavenly Jerusalem have some often quite comical mistakes, corrections and bodge-jobs that once you see, you can’t unnotice.

18th-Century French Chateau Razed 'By Mistake'

2012-12-05T11:45:00-05:00

The mayor's office in Yvrac said Wednesday that workers who were hired to renovate the grand 13,000-square-meter (140,000-square-foot) manor and raze a small building on the same estate in southwest France mixed them up. "The Chateau de Bellevue was Yvrac's pride and joy," said former owner Juliette Marmie. "The whole village is in shock. How can this construction firm make such a mistake?"

Via rfuller in the Forum: Chateau de Bellevue destroyed by idiots.